


Touch

by separatedrain



Series: OTP Challenge [3]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-19
Updated: 2014-01-19
Packaged: 2018-01-09 07:49:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1143411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/separatedrain/pseuds/separatedrain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The emotions humans experience are so much more raw, myriad, often conflicting. (Prompt #3 — watching a movie.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Touch

**Author's Note:**

> ...this is weird prosey b.s. that has extremely little to do with actual movies. I apologise. ([Tumblr edition](http://separatedrain.tumblr.com/post/63056033966/30-day-otp-challenge-3-watching-a-movie))

"Well, Sam’s already out like a light," Dean announces as he lowers himself onto the couch.

Castiel nods. Sam’s health has been gradually improving since they’d returned from the aborted trials a week or two before, for which he is grateful. The younger Winchester still tires easily, though.

"Guess that gives us some time to work on your cultural education, huh?" Dean uses the remote to scroll through a list of titles on the TV screen that Castiel doesn’t bother to pay particular attention to, hardly any of them sounding familiar to him anyway.

A few moments pass and Dean is apparently satisfied with his selection, as the movie begins to play. Castiel relaxes into the pillows and allows himself to become immersed in it.

After a while he finds himself, not for the first time in the past few weeks, marvelling at the wonders of the human limbic system. As an angel, he may have been chastised for feeling too strongly, but it was nothing compared to this. There was still an almost clinical detachment to that. The emotions humans experience are so much more raw, myriad, often conflicting. At a particularly touching moment within the movie, he feels the impulse to laugh and cry at the same time, and how does that even make sense?

Even all kinds of physical sensations are apparently capable of evoking emotions. Before, Castiel would be largely oblivious to the varying temperatures the vessel experienced, unless he chose to perceive them; now that he has been confined to it, he’s not only acutely aware of the heat or cold at all times (even as he’s lost all kinds of other superhuman perception), they even have the ability to make him feel content, or irritated, it seems.

Possibly his new favourite sensation is touch. Touch means warmth and sometimes almost a faint, inexplicable tingling, like a soft buzz of static electricity. It also evokes all kinds of other feelings that he can’t place or name entirely, but he instinctively knows are the good kind. They seem to draw and build on an existing layer of feelings that has been present for quite a while, now.

Experimentally, Castiel stretches out an arm, wraps it around Dean’s shoulders. He feels muscles tense up for a split-second at the unexpected contact; then Dean relaxes into it, focuses his attention on the movie again.

Touch isn’t just warmth. It’s strength and comfort and trust. Touch is love.


End file.
